Tropical forests support over two-thirds of the world's terrestrial biodiversity. However, between 35% and 50% of tropical forests have already been degraded, and the rate of deforestation continues to increase. Secondary forests, plantations and other human-modified habitats now dominate tropical landscapes, leading to concerns that human degradation of these landscapes will elevate greenhouse gas emissions and jeopardise ecosystem services at local, regional and global scales. The area of protected forests is unlikely to increase greatly in the future, so the persistence of tropical biodiversity and the important biogeochemical cycles and ecosystem services associated with it will depend to a large extent on the way we treat the wider tropical landscape. The Human Modified Tropical Forests programme seeks to 'significantly improve our understanding of the links between biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles in tropical forests' through 'integrated observations and modelling linked to gradients in forest modification'. To contribute towards this goal our consortium will use surveys along a modification gradient within the SAFE landscape in Sabah (Malaysian Borneo) to detect patterns, combined with manipulative field experiments to gain a mechanistic understanding of biodiversity-function linkages. We will assess links between above- and belowground components of tropical biodiversity and investigate the extent to which different elements of biodiversity (e.g. species of conservation concern) are associated with measures of ecosystem function (decomposition processes and biogeochemical cycles). We will then upscale from the experimental sites to the landscape-scale to generate spatial layers of ecosystem function, biodiversity, and greenhouse gas fluxes to inform policy scenario modeling. Our work will thus (1) characterise soil microbial function and measuring associated biogeochemical fluxes; (2) Experimentally test the links between aboveground biodiversity and soil function; (3) Build and add to existing datasets for bird and mammals, and explore correlations between ecosystem functioning and the distribution of species of conservation concern; and (4) Explore policy scenarios for optimising biodiversity and function protection.

The Supergen Bioenergy Hub will bring together academic, industrial an policy stakeholders to focus on sustaianable bioenergy systems. It will adopt an interdisciplinary approach focused on key innovation stages. Research at UK universities will generate new knowledge and insights in sustainable bioenergy, while incubating UK science to deliver its commerical potential and working with researchers to ensure their knowledge is diffused across the innovation community for wider benefit. This will deliver impact with policy makers via our well-established policy connections and a focused policy-makers only forum to address their key concerns. It will deliver impact with industrialists via an industry forum that will connect innovators with UK scientists and engineers who can support them. It will deliver impact with the wider sustainable energy and product community by establishing a professional forum which will support training of commercial professionals and key knowledge transfer in new knowledge areas. Above all it will foster stronger connections between the academic, industrial and policy sectors in a way that supports advancement of sustainable bioenergy in the U.K.

This project aims to understand how novel energy storage technologies might best be integrated into an evolving, lower-carbon UK energy system in the future. It will identify technical, environmental, public acceptability, economic and policy issues, and will propose solutions to overcome barriers to deployment. As electricity is increasingly generated by highly-variable renewables and relatively inflexible nuclear power stations, alternatives to the use of highly-flexible fossil-fuelled generation as a means of balancing the electricity system will become increasingly valuable. Numerous technologies for storing electricity are under development to meet this demand, and as the cost of storage is reduced through innovation, it is possible that they could have an important role in a low-carbon energy system. The Energy Storage Supergen Hub is producing a UK roadmap for energy storage that will be the starting point for this project. The value of grid-scale storage to the electricity system has been assessed for some scenarios. For extreme cases comprising only renewable and nuclear generation, the value is potentially substantial. However, the value of energy storage to the UK depends on the costs and benefits relative to sharing electricity imbalances through greater European interconnection, demand-side electricity response, and wider energy system storage, and the optimal approaches to integrating energy storage at different levels across the whole energy system are not well understood. This project will take a broader approach than existing projects by considering energy system scenarios in which storage options are more integrated across the whole energy system, using a series of soft-linked energy and electricity system models. Demand-side response and increased interconnection will be considered as counterfactual technologies that reduces the need for storage. Three broad hypotheses will be investigated in this project: (i) that a whole energy system approach to ES is necessary to fully understand how different technologies might contribute as innovation reduces costs and as the UK energy system evolves; (ii) that a range of technological, economic and social factors affect the value of ES, so should all be considered in energy system scenarios; and, (iii) that the economic value of the difference between good and bad policy decisions relating to the role of energy storage in the transition to low-carbon generation is in the order of £bns. A broader, multidisciplinary approach, which extends beyond the techno-economic methodologies that are adopted by most studies, will be used to fully assess the value of energy storage. This project will therefore also examine public acceptability issues for the first time, compare the environmental impacts of storage technologies using life-cycle analyses, and examine important economic issues surrounding market design to realise the value of storage services provided by consumers. All of these analyses will be underpinned by the development of technology-neutral metrics for ES technologies to inform the project modelling work and the wider scientific community. These multidisciplinary considerations will be combined in a series of integrated future scenarios for energy storage to identify no-regrets technologies. The project will conclude by examining the implications of these scenarios for UK Government policy, energy regulation and research priorities. The analyses will be technical only to the point of identifying the requirements for energy storage, with absolutely no bias towards or against any classes of storage technology.

Bioenergy provides a significant proportion of the UK's low carbon energy supply for heat, transport fuel and electricity. There is scope for bioenergy to provide much higher levels of low carbon energy in future, but this requires appropriate development of key enabling technologies and strategic management to make the best use of the valuable, but finite, biomass resource. It must also be acknowledged that there have been significant concerns raised about the long term sustainability of bioenergy systems, including the wider social and economic impacts of biomass production. This project will create a Supergen Bioenergy hub for the UK which will bring together industry, academia and other stakeholders to focus on the research and knowledge challenges associated with increasing the contribution of UK bioenergy to meet strategic environmental targets in a coherent, sustainable and cost-effective manner. It will do this by taking a "whole systems" approach to bioenergy, so that we focus on the benefits that new technologies can bring within the context of the whole production and utilisation chain. In order to ensure focused research with rapid dissemination and deployment this will be done in close collaboration with industrial partners and other stakeholders, including government agencies. The hub will also take an expressly interdisciplinary approach to bioenergy, ensuring that we address important issues, such as the impacts of land-use change not just as scientific quantification exercises, but taking due account of the social and economic impacts. The hub will carry out leading edge research to address the engineering challenges associated with bioenergy deployment, with a particular focus on enabling flexible energy vectors. Therefore we will carry out core research to address existing problems, for example increasing scientific understanding of biomass combustion to improve environmental emissions and developing torrefaction (heating the feedstock), which could improve the logistics (and therefore costs) of using biomass. However, we will also work on more strategic, long term options; using academic expertise to help industry resolve the engineering problems experienced to date with some advanced technologies like gasification and assessing the prospects for biomass-derived synthetic natural gas as a low carbon alternative to diminishing natural gas supplies and developing new technologies to produce more sustainable transport fuels from biomass. The project will progress many different bioenergy options for the UK, which have many different costs and benefits. Therefore we will particularly focus on evaluating the ecological, economic and social aspects of the bioenergy chains being developed. That will allow us to provide appropriate scientific evidence and information to government and other stakeholders to facilitate development of the most sustainable bioenergy systems for the UK.

Biomass is plant or woody material that during its growth has absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis . When the biomass is used to produce bioenergy it re-releases to atmosphere the same amount of CO2 as was sequestered during growth. Therefore, as long as biomass growth is close in time period to release there is no net addition to the long term atmospheric CO2 concentration. However, some aspects of processing and using the biomass may generate additional greenhouse gas emissions that need to be accounted for and, given that the UK is trying to decrease all carbon emissions it is important that we make efficient use of our biomass resource by maximizing the production and use of truly sustainable resource and developing efficient pre-treatment and conversion technologies. It is also important that we make the best use of the sustainable biomass resource and fully understand the wider impact and costs of implementation. This project brings together leading UK bioenergy research groups to develop sustainable bioenergy systems that support the UK's transition to an affordable, resilient, low-carbon energy future. We will synthesize previous work on land and feedstock availability to assess the realistic potential resource for UK bioenergy and examine new crops that could support UK farming by delivering ecosystem benefits as well as biomass resource. We will test the performance of different feedstocks in high efficiency conversion options and develop new techniques which will improve resource efficiency in bioenergy systems, especially at small scale. We will evaluate the impact of using biomass for heat, electricity, transport fuels or chemicals to provide independent, authoritative information to guide decision making by industrialists and policy makers. We will assess the potential for bioenergy to contribute a proportion of the UK's future sustainable energy mix, taking into account the environmental, economic and social impacts of the processes. We will work with industrialists and policy makers to ensure that our work is relevant to their needs and reflects achievable implementation standards. We will share our findings in our research work widely with the industry and policy communities and make it accessible to societal stakeholders on our website, via special publications, in the conventional and on social media and with tailored events for public engagement.